Enzyklopädie der Medien, Band 5: Politik und Medien

With provocative as well as prophetic essays, Peter Weibel traces the expansion of the arts into reality and the media which has critically challenged the monopoly of state and mass media institutions, from print to social media, on the construction of the public sphere and reality. Weibel describes in detail how the two most important innovations in art after 1945, participatory and collective action and media art as well as the transformation of historical static art forms into time-based forms of action, gave rise to an artistic activism that changed the field of art globally. The artistic revolutions also provided impulses for social and political liberation movements.

Conflicts and crises therefore accompanied the emergence of an art that took place predominantly not in museums and galleries, in the protected space of artistic freedom, but in the streets, in direct confrontation with reality and the public. The arenas of confrontation were therefore courtrooms, not galleries, trial records, and not art journals.

Weibel’s theoretical texts reveal the discourses and dispositives of power in the fields of politics and society, but also of culture and art. He fundamentally analyzed current discourses, such as identity politics, gender and violence, (post-) colonialism, global migration, defects of democracies, the end of Eurocentrism, the digital transformation, against their historical background decades ago.

Weibel’s media theory provides new logical, semiotic, and analytical tools with which to repair the distortion of reality caused by the misuse of the media. He names the actors and strategies that can still be instances of truth and reality in the field of tension between politics and mass media, between media of power and power of the media: new forms of art that deal with politics and media.

University of Applied Arts Vienna